Chapter 29
JILL AND I ARE meeting with Camilla in one hour, and now, at home, the three of us are sitting around the dining room table, arguing over a T-shirt.
“Julie, you’re wearing my shirt,” Jill insists for the tenth time.
“Jill, this is my shirt. Jackie, tell her it’s my shirt.”
I lean back in my chair and sigh like a disappointed parent. “Don’t bring me into this.”
Jillian is rocking her usual morning getup—oversize band T-shirt, men’s boxer shorts, smudges of eyeliner around her eyes. Julie, on the other hand, decided to come downstairs this morning also in a concert tee. Only it’s a Shania Twain shirt we bought years ago at her concert. I bought one. Julie bought one. Jillian bought one. Somehow, there is a fourth T-shirt. And Jillian swears it belongs to her and Julie has stolen it.
“I bought a second shirt at that concert. I always buy two! It’s my thing!” Jill says, violently squishing a lemon scone in her fist.
“ I always buy two shirts, Jill! This is mine . This is the second top I bought.”
I check the time on the stove. “Our meeting is in an hour. We should probably—”
“Shut up, Jackie!” they say at the same time.
“Yup. Sorry.” I sink down in my chair and let the fight unfold.
Some twenty minutes later, they reach an agreement: since no one can really remember who bought the shirt, they will share it, like joint custody over a child. Julie will wear it from Monday to Wednesday, Jillian will wear it from Thursday to Saturday, and they will alternate every other Sunday.
“Now that the custody battle has been settled, can we get back to business?”
“Please,” Jillian says.
It’s Monday morning, and right at nine o’clock, Jillian and I are going to walk into The Rundown and pitch our advice column to Camilla. When I finally worked up the courage to share the idea with my sisters, they immediately loved it. We all agreed it was a great way to take what I started on pleasebreakmyheart and bring it to a whole new level—this time, with their approval beforehand .
Ideally, we want to streamline this as a duo. Jill would be the main writer, and if Camilla agrees to it, I’ll be brought on as the assistant writer. Initially I wanted to run the advice column alone, but considering I have no real writing experience, I figured that was too much to ask. I’m hoping Jillian serving as my mentor will sway Camilla.
Plus, Jill said she’d vouch for me. And she is dating the boss, so...
“You guys have the idea decided on?” Julie asks. She cuts a scone in half and eats it over a napkin.
I brush the sea of crumbs in front of me into a neat little pile. “Yes. A write-in advice column. Readers send an email, we sift through them, and every week we publish one to three of their questions, giving them an answer to their problems.”
“But it’s not heartbreak specific,” Jill says.
“I think it should be,” I say. “I like the idea of keeping it heartbreak-related like my account was. Clearly, there’s a huge market for people looking for breakup advice. It could really separate us from other advice columns out there.”
“First, I’m so proud of you both that I could cry... and I will do so later in the privacy of my bedroom,” Julie begins matter-of-factly. “Second, I love that idea, Jackie. I think it’s a really, really great point. And this was your idea. So whatever you think is best, we should go with it.”
“I agree,” Jill adds.
I beam at their approval.
“Then let’s move forward assuming that’s the game plan,” Julie says, clapping her hands like a teacher. “Okay! So what are we still deciding on?”
“A title,” I say. The idea is solid, but we can’t decide what to call the column.
“Wait—I have an idea.” Jill runs out of the room and returns a minute later with her notepad. She flips it open, searches for a page. “Here! I jotted this down the other day when you said it, Jackie. What about ‘A Change of Heart’?”
Me and Julie go ooooooooh . “I like that,” I say. “It definitely fits the theme.”
“I like it too,” Julie says. “But what about something that’s even more specific to heartbreak?”
Jillian closes the notepad. “What do you mean?”
“Uhm.” Julie pauses, thinking. “Like, something readers will instantly feel connected with. A phrase or a word that is almost too on the nose, that every woman on the planet has used at some point in her life. A sentence or quip that’s used again and again, nearly to the point where it’s a cliché.”
“Okaaaaaay,” I say, following her train of thought. “Well, you two would know this better than me. What are some common phrases said during breakups?”
“‘I think we should see other people’,” Jill offers.
“‘We should take a break’,” Julie adds.
“True, but those don’t really work as a title,” I say.
We think on it for a second longer; then Julie’s face lights up. “I’ve got it. What about ‘it’s not you, it’s me’?”
Jillian immediately shoots the idea down. “No way.”
“Why!”
“Because ninety-nine percent of the time it isn’t you. It’s actually them .”
Then it hits me. The second the words appear in my head, I know I’ve found our title. “What about ‘it’s not me, it’s you’?”
A gazillion seconds have passed by in silence. Camilla rests her chin on her hand, deep in thought. We are sitting in her office, and I feel like I’m going to jump out of my skin. We just pitched the advice column idea, It’s Not Me, It’s You, and are waiting for a verdict. Does she like it? Hate it? Never want to hear from me again? I swear, Cami has the greatest poker face known to man. Someone take this woman to a casino, stat.
“I like it,” she says finally. Jill and I shamelessly high-five. “Don’t get me wrong, there’s a few kinks we have to work out. But I really love it, ladies. This could take The Rundown into an entirely new direction. Bring in a whole new reader base. It’s sort of genius. How did you come up with this again?”
“It was all Jackie’s idea,” Jill says, winking at me. When she revealed that she’d honor my anonymity with the pleasebreakmyheart article and keep it a secret, even from Camilla, it meant more to me than I could ever say.
“That’s not totally true,” I say. “This idea was a culmination of spending years learning and listening to my sisters. If it weren’t for them, this column wouldn’t exist.”
Cami is smiling at both of us. I hope that when she and Jill are ready, she can start coming over again so we can get to know the real her.
“And I’m obsessed with the title. It’s quirky, it’s cute. It brings such a fun, light element to something that is naturally heavy. It’s perfect,” Camilla says.
My cheeks hurt from smiling. “I’m so glad you like it. So... Is this going to happen? Jill and I can run this column?”
Camilla pushes back from her desk, sitting up a bit straighter in her office chair. “Jackie, I’m ready to take a chance on you. We can discuss the details later, but if you want it, there’s a spot here for you here as our assistant writer.”
It feels like time has frozen and my heart has stopped beating.
“Are you serious?” I whisper.
Cami laughs. “I’m dead serious.”
Beside me, Jill grasps my hand.
I think back to all those days, nights, weeks, months I spent tossing and turning, searching beneath every rock, peeking into every nook and cranny, trying to find some glimpse of myself. Trying to discover who I was, what I’m good at, and, most important, who I want to be. Every moment—every wrong turn, every stumble, every guess in the dark—brought me right here. Without even realizing it, I think I ended up exactly where I was supposed to be all along.
“I’d love to,” I say. Tears spring loose from my eyes.
Cami is smiling ear to ear. “Great. Now, there’s just one other thing.”
“What’s that?” Jill asks. She leans forward, like she’s ready to shoot down any concern Cami may have.
“Well, Jill, you managed to snag that interview with pleasebreakmyheart that we talked about. Even if we never went through with publishing it, since the account was randomly taken down, I was still impressed by your initiative.” Jill and I share a look. Camilla continues talking. “And if you’re also going to be mentoring Jackie and streamlining this column, I feel like you probably need a new job title, too. How does senior writer sound?”
For the first time in my life, I see Jillian cry. The tears fall down her cheeks and drip onto her T-shirt. She laughs through the tears, wiping them off her face as if she doesn’t know where they even came from. “Senior writer sounds pretty great to me,” she says.
And that’s how It’s Not Me, It’s You was born from pleasebreakmyheart . It went from being a secret I guarded with my life, this thing I password protected, locked behind a vault—an endeavor I embarked on all on my own. I stumbled through the dark and managed to find my footing, but now it’s different. There’s no more stumbling or going in blind. Now I’m doing this with my sister. It’s no longer mine. Now, it’s ours.
Somehow, that is infinitely better.